The latest news from Arizona in the neonatal baseball season is John Hickey’s profile piece on Adrian Beltre, the new starting third baseman for Your 2005 Seattle Mariners. I look at this article, I look at his career and 2004 statistics, and I look at his 2005 PECOTA projection and comparables (.279/.337/.486 weighted mean, and this is probably hilariously conservative), and I think to myself: Holy shit, I can’t believe we actually got this guy playing for our team.

Adrian freakin’ Beltre. It still brings a smile to my face, two and a half months later. I can’t believe this actually happened. Whoo.

I can’t get at my e-mail at the moment — my mailhost has decided to stick its fingers into port 22 and sing “la la la I can’t hear you!” as loudly as it can. (And POP’s been broken since before Christmas — I can LIST just fine, but RETR sends the mail headers and then hangs up. Any ideas?) As a result, any urgent e-mail you’re trying to send to me… won’t actually make it anywhere near me until this gets resolved.

Highly frustrating, but what can you do?

But extra special congratulations go out to my font wizard pal for his big win at work, and mad props go out to other people who know who they are for reasons they already understand.

I see (mostly by way of this) that the Terri Schiavo case is back in the news, thanks to the trial being finished, and the judge having rendered a decision, with implementation of the decision to begin soon-ish. Everything I want to say about Schiavo I’ve already said before, but there’s at least two things that bear repeating.

First of all, the comment in the Shotgun about death by dehydration is curious. Some quick Googling reveals that the quote by Dr. William Burke comes from a book by Wesley J. Smith entitled Forced Exit: The Slippery Slope from Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder, and you don’t have to spend any sort of quality time with Google or Amazon to figure out what kind of agenda that book is trying to push. (Indeed, most of the examples of Smith’s writing has struck me as deeply, um, hysterical, and his comments about the “death culture” within medicine leave me scratching my head: How come nobody told me about this?) Dr. Burke is a professor of neurology at Saint Louis University School of Medicine where he spends at least a chunk of his time dealing with Alzheimer’s patients, which means he’s probably got at least some familiarity with palliative and end-of-life issues, so I have to accord his perspective at least some respect.

Unfortunately, his position — that dehydration is a “bad death” — doesn’t seem to be supported by the evidence. Ganzini et al, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that it ain’t necessarily so: “Nurses reported that patients chose to stop eating and drinking because they were ready to die, saw continued existence as pointless, and considered their quality of life poor. The survey showed that 85 percent of patients died within 15 days after stopping food and fluids. On a scale from 0 (a very bad death) to 9 (a very good death), the median score for the quality of these deaths, as rated by the nurses, was 8.” I know a lot of nurses, and I don’t think any of them would rate a death that involved seizures, extensive bleeding from mucosal membranes, and repeated vomiting episodes as a “good death.” It seems odd that the only article I’ve been able to find on the topic very nearly directly refutes Dr. Burke’s position (which has bounced around the echo chamber, almost without citation, since this whole mess resurfaced).

There’s an interesting interview with Dr. Ganzini over at Medscape (I’ve linked to Google’s cache, so you don’t have to register) where she talks about some of the meta-issues involved in her 2003 study. One point she made caught my eye:

[Voluntary dehydration] has been going on long before our study, but it hasn’t really been discussed. I hope this study will put it out on the table to increase discussions about it. The healthcare profession has always allowed terminally ill patients to refuse food or fluids for comfort reasons, such as anorexia or nausea, but now we need to talk about it in those patients who do it to hasten death. It needs to bring about a broader discussion of how we can improve palliative care and meet unmet needs.

Yeah. What she said.

Secondly.. well, I hate quoting myself, and think it’s the height of arrogance, but I already said this once and doubt I could ever put it again so well..

Here’s something to think about: If you believe that a competent adult has the right to decide to die, and to refuse particular forms of medical care to further his goal of dying,

.. meaning that if Terri Schiavo could have made this decision for herself (never mind if she would have, let’s work with the decisions she could have made)…

is it appropriate to prevent a decision-maker for that individual from making the same choice for him in the event he is born incompetent or becomes incompetent at a later point in life? Is there a difference? The activists would have you believe that of course there’s a difference, that the difference is critical, but is it really? The argument is framed in the context of promoting equal protection and equal rights, but it’s really just a special pleading: Equal protection and equal rights would necessarily require a proxy be capable of making those choices for an incompetent individual, because otherwise said individual would not be equal. Options that would be open to them were they competent would be closed solely by virtue of their incompetency, and that’s (say it with me) discrimination.

Even if the [activists] are right, and the criteria we use for basing decisions about life and death for incompetent individuals are biased in favor of the able (they frequently use the awful word “ableist”), so what? We’re in this mess because congenitally incompetent individuals do not possess value systems, and so we must find some system into which we can place these individuals; we look, under these circumstances, to society at large. And we ask the questions that we would ask of ourselves were we in the same place; we use “reasonable person” standards of judgment. For those individuals who become incompetent later in life, we use the values of the society to which the individual was raised and lived and is (arguably) still a part of. If you don’t like this, you need to come up with a system that allows for a different values system to be imposed upon the incompetent that do not place them at a disadvantage compared to the rest of us — unless you’re willing to be inconsistent and argue for accomodation and no special treatment when it suits you, and very special treatment when it doesn’t. …

In the absence of clear, compelling evidence to the contrary, one can only attribute to an incompetent person those values that would be possessed by a reasonable member of the society in which that person lives. This does not mean opinion polls. This does not mean “what the church thinks.” This does not mean 95% of what people think it does when they talk about societal values. It also doesn’t mean “what does society think a proxy decision maker should be able to do.” It does mean “what does society think an individual person should be able to do for themselves” — a very different question, and one that has been repeatedly missed.

This point gets missed, repeatedly. The point is free to be argued or rejected, of course, but it is truly aggravating that it isn’t even considered most of the time.

I think a lot of the heat and light over this issue probably has something to do with the reflex revulsion we have to it. But that’s not a good foundation for public policy, and not a good foundation for medical decision-making. We don’t like thinking about end-of-life issues, and although most of us know we’re going to die, I suspect most of us don’t actually believe it, and that drives a lot of our popular thinking about death and dying. (Personally, I’m not afraid of death. I am, however, very afraid of dying. It’s not the same thing.) We’re not doing ourselves any favors by talking about these issues in hyperbolic terms, throwing the “murder” label around, and arguing in favor of a wholly imaginary conspiracy against incompetent individuals and a culture of death.

There are those who think all deliberate death — whether by an individual’s own hand, or by someone else’s, whatever the circumstances — is a sin, immoral, and an unconscionable act. I can accept that. But I don’t believe that’s true by any objective standard, or that it’s useful as a starting point for discussions about death. And I also believe that there is such a thing as a good death, and that it is not only appropriate by required for physicians, nurses, and other health care providers to say, “That’s enough,” and let nature take its course. These choices were easy when people died at age 40 from disease we laugh at today, and were simpler when we didn’t have ICUs and ventilators and invasive feeding tubes, but people don’t die at age 40, and we do have intensivists who can keep shockingly sick people alive far longer than they ever would have lived at any point in the past. Does this constitute progress? I don’t know — it depends on the person and it depends on the disease. And it also depends on the prognosis, and the expected clinical course.

As I’ve said before, I have no real opinion one way or the other about what should happen to Terri Schiavo. It sounds a lot like I’m arguing in favor of discontinuing her feeding and perhaps I am, but that’s not the position I’ve carved out in my head. The positions I’ve taken in all my writing on the subject are generally in opposition to those held by people who want her kept alive, mostly because they’re using arguments that I find truly repugnant (or stupid, or just plain wrong) to justify their own positions. I’m sure that, if I spent enough time, I could construct equally valid criticisms for the other side, but as they say, this is my Web page, and the other side’s arguments don’t piss me off nearly as much. Even that’s saying something — the fact that this case is seen by many as having sides is highly irritating. It’s not about what side you’re on, or what you believe is morally right or wrong, or what you think the role of the state is, or whether you’re a life-loving conservative or a death-worshipping liberal.

It’s about what’s right for one specific person, and who gets to decide what’s right for that person.

And in their haste to score points in the ever-escalating rhetorical war against the demons of The Other Side, it seems as though politically-oriented commentators forget that a lot.

The Vancouver Police Department is soliciting recommendations for a new cruiser decal and paint scheme. It’s kind of a nifty idea. This sort of thing is always fraught with peril, because you can end up with some truly hideous schemes, and it’s nice to see that the VPD actually cares what its citizens think. Or maybe not, since Chief Constable Jamie Graham will consider the suggestions and then make up his own mind. No one has ever accused the VPD — or any police department, for that matter — of being anything less than a democratic dictatorship.

There’s a form you can use to select among one of four pre-approved designs (or suggest your own changes). Though I’m not participating — it’s not my tax money at work, after all — I think all four schemes are ugly as sin. #3, in particular, has the disgusting look of a suburban American police department paint job.

Who did this stuff? Yecch.

A couple of months ago, I made mention of Doug Coupland’s new book, jPod — a sequel, of sorts, to Microserfs, quite possibly one of the most beloved books in my life, if not the most beloved. When you find a book that so accurately captures many facets of your personality, and of the personalities of your friends, you tend to hold on to it (or reject it outright, simply because it frightens you). I’ve told a number of people that if they really want to understand how it feels to be me on some days, Microserfs is the book to read — even if it’s ten years out of date and I don’t work in that field anymore. This is me and my friends; I saw myself, and I saw people I knew, and I saw the culture that I considered myself a part of (and still do, to some extent).

Over the years I’ve encountered people who’ve read Coupland and had all kinds of reactions to his work; rarely, if ever, do I find someone who is ambivalent about his writing. You seem to either find him fascinatingly perceptive (to the point of frightening, sometimes) or maddeningly tedious; there’s not a lot in between, and I think where you fall depends largely on whether you find the characters appealing or not. Doug creates these great characters, builds a universe for them, and turns them loose, and while you can complain that his books lack plots, that’s a feature for me, not a bug. I can’t think of a single instance in a Doug Coupland novel where a character has done something that wasn’t wholly within their clearly-defined personality. I love that kind of stuff.

It doesn’t hurt that he sometimes nails things so well that it can be almost heartbreaking. “Love was frightening and it hurt,” he once wrote (in the passage that made me realize I’d be a Coupland fan for life), “not only during, but afterward — when I fell out of love. But that is another story. I’d like to fall in love again, but my only hope is that love doesn’t happen to me too often after this. I don’t want to get so used to falling in love that I get curious to experience something more extreme — whatever that might be.” Tell me that doesn’t sound like someone you know.

Anyway.

I’ve been dying to know how he was planning to follow up on Microserfs, and now I know. Sort of:

Could you tell us a little about jPod, the novel you’re currently working on?
It’s about people who work in game design, which is a lot of my friends here in Vancouver. It’s a sequel to Microserfs but different. Tech is such a different place ten years later.

Sweet!

What I want to know is this: Is there going to be a character in there who, unlike the bright lights who get their names in the credits at the end of the game, toils away in obscurity on the core technology behind the game, and maybe fights with shitty font rendering software the company picked for a bunch of potentially spurious reasons? ’cause that would kick ass if there were. (I don’t know anyone like this at all, can you tell?) I also expect some bitter coders, young pimply QA testers, art institute graduates who don’t know squat about programming but can design the shit out of anything, slave-driving managers, pissed off spouses with LiveJournals (with 5,000 comment threads), some cast-offs from the dot-com glory days, and people who went into the business not out of passion but out of a belief that you could make assloads of cash.

I can’t wait for it.

I was poking through my CD collection tonight looking for a few specific tracks (three versions of “Solsbury Hill” — album, live, and cover by Sarah McLachlan) and wondering why it was that I own all these discs but don’t actually listen to them on nearly as regular a basis as I should. Possibly I need to sit down and systematically rip them all; I found albums I hadn’t heard in years, but loved fiercely at the time — familiar names, like Sue Medley, Annie Lennox, Faith No More, Toad The Wet Sprocket, Alice in Chains, Melanie Doane, frickin’ Enya.. but names that I’ve forgotten in recent years, much to my sorrow. Why does this happen? Last night I heard Jann Arden’s Happy? all the way through for the first time since 2001 or so — probably since I saw her play live in support of that album — and was reminded of how her stuff used to blow me away. And I wondered why it was I hadn’t pulled it out and listened to it in four or five years.

It’s always interesting to remember the most poignant moments of your relationship with music from certain artists — I was in San Antonio, for instance, when I discovered Shawn Colvin (in a duet with Bruce Hornsby), and I recall the “holy shit” moment with stark clarity, lying in the dark of my hotel room listening to the disc by myself. Many of these “holy shit” moments seem to involve travel and being away from home, which may magnify and heighten the feeling of discovery; I knew I liked Fumbling Towards Ecstasy from the pre-release tracks I’d heard on the radio ahead of its release, but I didn’t fall in love with it until I listened to “Wait” with my headphones partially plugged in, in a hotel room in Vancouver. These moments, and hundreds more like them, are seared into my memory — as I suspect they are for most people who love music and build soundtracks for their lives, one day and one track at a time. You almost never do it on purpose, but inevitably, it happens.

It was in Montreal that I bought Time For Mercy back in the late fall of 1993. I’d heard “Will You Remember Me?” on the radio a week or so earlier, and it happened that I was in Quebec on the day the disc was released, so I ambled over to the record store and bought a copy. And then I sat in bright October sunshine, in the concrete plaza in front of the IBM tower in downtown Montreal, and listened to the whole thing twice, trying to focus on reading something I don’t remember anymore but being thoroughly distracted, and thinking that it was the most amazing stuff I’d heard in years. I played that disc so much over the next few months that looking at it now, I’m amazed it still plays — a testament, I suppose, to the error-correcting power of the CD format, and the flexibility of new CD players. And then I moved on to other things. But I can’t shake the feeling that forgetting about these artists, discarding these albums, is somehow wrong, regardless of whether I can actually find them again and have the joy of re-discovering something so treasured once upon a time.

There’s an element of sadness associated with this rediscovery, especially if it turns out there were other memories associated with the music. It’s hard for me to listen to Paula Cole’s Harbriger, for instance, since it came into my life during a moment of great stress and sorrow. But when I do, I remember the misery and how much it hurt… and I remember that whatever I felt then, I don’t feel now. The hurt is gone now, and I’m better. It’s a good feeling. Happy? I dunno. But not sad. Not that at all.

Seattle P-I: Ichiro’s goals? Numbers tough to imagine. In the midst of the typical article about spring training (coincident with the first full day of squad workouts and everybody being in camp), John Hickey speaks frightening truth:

Spring training is conducive to dreams.

Oh, hell yes. Go Mariners!

Chad Orzel: “To the extent that I do believe that blogs will change society, I think it will be a different kind of change than readers of political blogs are looking for. Political blogs aren’t a new kind of journalism, they’re a new kind of punditry– they’re talk radio with lower barriers to entry.”

Amen to that.

One thing I’d add is that the only thing about blogging that’s fundamentally different from any other form of Web site in the entire history of the World Wide Web is that the person doing the writing doesn’t actually have to have any technical knowledge. As Teresa Nielsen Hayden has said, it used to be that there was some kind of barrier to making a nuisance of yourself in public. You either had to “learn how to run a mimeograph, and you had to pay postage to distribute your deatheless prose,” and the people who didn’t “found other hobbies.” The Web dramatically lowered the knowledge barrier to this kind of thing; blogging per se didn’t change anything — there have been personal journals on the Web since the earliest days of http — but blogging software changed much: It eliminated the need to know anything about HTML and Web site configuration and management.

The revolution had nothing to do with Pyra or Blogger or Instacracker or whoever, it had everything to do with Marc and NCSA — remember this? I do.

The format changed by getting easier, the underlying essence did not. I am undecided as to whether this is, on the whole, a positive thing or not.

Update: Has it really been 11 years since Mosaic came out? Holy hell.

Let’s face it: February sucks. It sucks so much, in fact, that all kinds of organizations, from unions to my former home province, look for any reason at all to declare at least one long weekend during the whole thing. Reading break, so welcome in November (read: near the end of fall semester), comes ridiculously early in the winter/spring term, and spring break.. well, you’ve seen the late night commercials. Spring break looks like a lot of fun.

But most of us don’t have spring break, and most of us don’t work for entities that are willing to declare holidays. Some of us, in fact, work for entities where a declared holiday has absolutely no effect on whether you can slack off at home while hung over or not. Which sucks, but this is the life we chose. So February, for the majority of us, sucks.

When I was a kid, it meant snow, crazy-cold weather punctuated by crazy-warm chinooks (depending on the vagarities of coastal weather), being tackled to the thawing turf during those rare moments of mid-winter warmth, and not getting Valentine’s Day cards. Now that I’m theoretically grown up and live elsewhere, I have to watch for the mud and deal with crazy-cold weather punctuated by rain. I don’t get tackled anymore, and as for the Valentine’s Day cards.. well, let’s just say that some years are better than others, and this was a very good year.

As I’ve gotten older, though, and as I’ve come to have different hobbies, and as my love for certain things has intensified, I’ve begun to see February in an entirely different light. And it all has to do with four simple little words that make most of my friends roll their eyes: “Pitchers and catchers report.” Go ahead, laugh. It’s stupid. It’s baseball. Sports fandom, for the non-fan, is always incomprehenisbly dumb. But baseball, the sport of the long season, the sport with 162 days of news and surprise and delight, has six months of dormancy — and every year, I anticipate the approach of the new season a little bit more. Those words become sweeter every year; the wait between the end of the World Series and Opening Day becomes longer every year, too.

This year felt worse than most. I missed baseball more that I think I did last year, despite the crappy crappy season of Mariners baseball I was forced to endure in 2004. Anticipation built and built, thanks to some truly brilliant moves on the part of the team, and I cannot wait for 4 April — it’s just going to be a beautiful thing, watching this team take to the field. Last year I went to Arizona for my first spring training; this year, it’s not possible, but I’ll be there in spirit. There’s no better way to kiss the winter goodbye, and usher in spring, than watching the fledgling baseball season get off the ground. A fabulous, wonderous thing.

The old game waits under the white
Deeper than frozen grass
Down at the frost line, it waits
To return, when the birds return
It starts to wake in the south
where it’s never quite stopped
Where winter is a doze of hibernation
The game wakes gradually
fathering vigor to itself as the days lengthen late in February
and grow warmer
Old muscles grow limber
Young arms throw strong and wild
Clogged vein systems in veteran oaks and left-fielders both
Unstop themselves putting forth leaves and line drives
in Florida’s March

Migrating north with the swallows
Baseball and the grasses first green
Enter Cleveland, Kansas City, Boston
–Donald Hall

Go Mariners.

Following the euthanizing of Under a Blackened Sky, I decided I still needed some kind of outlet for idiotic inanities, and this seems like as good a place as any. The truly sad thing is that I’m likely to end up updating more over here than I ever did at the other place, and that I’ll also end up giving money to the LJ guys because I use and (ugh, I can’t believe I’m about to say this) actually like their software. So here we are.

I’ve been back and forth between Victoria and the mainland a lot lately, for four or five days at a stretch, living in hotels and generally missing people who know who they are. This week I’ve been staying in Richmond — the downtowny part of Richmond, I mean. The part you drive through from time to time, but don’t actually spend any time in. It’s a neat place, and I’m starting to wonder why I never realized that before. It reminds me a bit of being in Tokyo, without actually being in Tokyo (or leaving the country, for that matter) — once again, there are lots of little short people all over the place, talking in a language you don’t understand, with signage you can’t read, and, if you were to walk into a random shop in both Richmond and Tokyo, you’re probably about as likely to find someone who can speak English.

It’s the little things: More neon than you might be used to seeing in North American (though Vancouver has always been a little unique in that department), strobe lights advertising stuff, incomprehensible deals on strange prodcuts you’ve never heard of, bizarre foods, both prepared and raw, and a preponderance of really damn good and fast Asian food.

This can get particularly funny — I went to a Japanese bistro last night, where the food was better than average North American quality, but worse than what you’d get on the other side of the Pacific. As you might expect, the menu isn’t really in English.. but it’s also not in Japanese, either. I walked into the restaurant, and the staff yelled out, “Irrashimase!” just like they do Over There. “Cool!” I thought. “This is one of those Japanese restaurants!” I turned to the guy closest to me, and said, in Japanese, “Good evening, and thank you; I’d like a table for one, please.” And I got this blank look back. “Oh-kay, clearly not one of those Japanese restaurants.” Yet Cantonese was widely spoken and understood. I don’t know what to make of this.

No, people don’t drive on the wrong side of the road, and the alleys and streets aren’t quite as vibrant, but there’s a touch of difference about this place that I find kind of appealing. Two years ago, the last time I spent any significant amount of time in Richmond (about a day), it mostly annoyed me; now, I kinda like it. But Yaohan is easily the equal of any shopping mall you’re likely to find in Japan, and if you close your eyes.. well, you might not believe it, but you could fool yourself.